If you look at the recent pictures on TMC of this site, you will see that there are now two big “sheds”. Speculation is that the original shed contains the switchgear and Supercharger cabinets, ie. the parts necessary for any Supercharger site, while the second shed may contain a large ESS – ie. Tesla Energy PowerPacks.

It would be interesting to see if this ‘largest’ supercharger complex gets some of the ‘powerwall’ batteries to minimize “demand contracted for”, which I believe is the way they do it in Italy. With expensive electricity, and demand contracts, those batteries must seem like an inexpensive way out of the problem. 16 cars would be around 1GW so it will be interesting to see when the 16 stall complexes will be built.

You’d think with more and more Teslas on the road, sooner or later there would be bottlenecks at the chargers should Tesla ever slow down the rate at which they are being constructed.

I love it when someone says North America, do they even know what parts of the world are North America? Cuba and Honduras are part of N.A. I believe Greenland is also in North America, So how many Superchargers are there in these countries? I would say none.
For some reason when people say North America they mean the USA and Canada but it includes several countries, including Mexico

I think most Tesla Supercharger stations have batteries. Since the Model S can charge at such a high-rate, Supercharger stations can be a headache for local utilities with such sharp quick draws of power. And that may cause the local utilities to hit Tesla with demand-charges. So by installing battery packs, they can manage the sharp draws and thus make things easier for the local utility and avoid high demand charges.

Note that according to one comment, even at one of those stations which has one, is (or was) disconnected:

“Mojave has a battery too. However, recent pictures show that it is not active. The disconnect was locked in the off position.”

It may be that going forward, more new Supercharger stations will have them installed. Or perhaps, like the idea of having them solar powered, this will be a plan which receives little more than lip service from Tesla; a lot more hype than reality.

I don’t know. I’d love to see an analysis from someone who has knowledge of grid power issues such as demand surcharges for industrial power. Do the Superchargers draw enough power to get those surcharges, and if so, what is the total annual fee per station? My guess is that it’s not so much a shortage of batteries. Sure, Tesla is pretty clearly production constrained by the battery supply. (They wouldn’t be building a very expensive battery Gigafactory if they weren’t!) But Tesla made and sold 17,300 Model S’s last year (as estimated by InsideEVs). By comparison, there are only a few hundred Supercharger stations worldwide (altho with an average of 5 stalls per station). Note various comments, from those who apparently know what they’re talking about, that the Powerwall is still too expensive for mass adoption. In other words, a cost/benefit analysis would show that installing a Powerwall doesn’t make economic sense for most residential or commercial customers, even those with a solar power installation. My guess is the same cost/benefit analysis shows that it’s not cost-effective for Tesla to make, install, and maintain battery packs at the average Supercharger station. (That may change when the Gigafactory starts mass… Read more »